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Saturday, August 06, 2011

I only just saw this, but Google - and others - have been celebrating Lucille Ball's centennial birthday. Ball had a long career that began in film, but she was best known for her television work. She also was the first woman to run a major television studio, but most importantly, she was my grandmother's favorite comedian.

5D Mark III, 1D Mark V & 1Ds Mark IV Tidbits | CanonRumors
It definitely continues to be a hot time for rumors, with Canon getting into the game now. CanonRumors reports that 5D Mark III's are "in the wild and an announcement is imminent." It seems like only three days ago they were saying that the 5D Mark II replacement would be coming out in Quarter 1, 2012. Oh wait! It wasthree days ago.

They also print "A Very Detailed 1D Mark V Spec List [CR1]" which lists the video as H.264 and having HDMI out. Which seems to squash hopes for a higher compression rate (like MPEG2 @ 50 Mbps like the pro camcorders Canon produce) or some sort of RAW or HD-SDI output. It does list 1920 x 1080 at 120, 60, 30, 25, 24 fps, and those high frame rates could be interesting.

The speeches were longer than anticipated, the day was one of Glasgow’s hottest and half way through both Canon 60Ds brought up a thermometer indication, indicators flashing and both cameras switched off within a minute of each other leaving both boys shocked to the core.

Handycam HDR-TD10 | Jeremy Stamas | Camcorderinfo.comCamcorderinfo does a full review of the Sony 3D camcorder, the HDR-TD10. They like it better than the JVC GS-TD1 and the Panasonic HDC-SDT750, but that doesn't mean they think you should buy one:

The quality of the HDR-TD10’s 3D recordings were decent at times. We found the 3D effect was generally good, as long as you took care to set up your shot with proper depth levels. You can adjust the 3D depth manually on the camcorder, but it is a somewhat frustrating process. You’ll most likely want to stick with the camcorder’s auto 3D depth control for a simpler experience.

Friday, August 05, 2011

SonyAlphaRumors continues it's stream of rumors on the upcoming Sony announcements. The latest stories bring a short user report of the NEX-7 and the Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 lens. It's unclear whether the lens is an E- or A- mount. I am assuming it will be an A- mount, but maybe not.

Even more exciting is additional details about the NEX-VG20 which will have a 16 mega-pixel sensor, support 60p/60i/24p (no 30p?), and will have audio level controls.

Canon EF 8-15mm f/4 L USM fisheye Hands-on Review | DigitalRevTV | YouTube
After mentioning yesterday that there were no reviews online that I could find, here's a review of the lens by Kai of DigitalRev TV, made during an open top tour bus ride. There's not a lot of video shot with the lens; if you jump to near the end there's a long sequence with the lens at 8mm on a full-frame sensor camera. Since it is a video review, I wish there had been more video shot at the two ends of the focal length with both full-frame and crop sensor cameras.

When I played briefly with the prototype lens on a crop-sensor camera last year, I was quite excited about it; it gave a distorted, but wide view that I thought I liked. But seeing these limited examples didn't really get me excited.

Matas designed the camera, photos, maps, settings and battery display for the iPhone. The iPhone doesn't ship with very many apps and Matas designed at least four of them. He also designed the Photos app for the iPad. He designed Time Machine and Photo Booth for the Mac. He's not Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guy at the very top, but he's pretty high profile none the less.

3D Mic Pro and immersive audio | Vincent Laforet | VincentLaforet
Vincent has been playing with the 3D Mic Pro from Mitra, and is really impressed by it. These unusual microphones capture a stereo image, and according to Vincent, the mics are essentially identical, but the 3D Indie [$695] has a phono plug, while the Pro [$999] version has two XLR plugs. Vincent has a code on his web page that will get you 15% off too.

The basic thing you need to know about this microphone, is that it has two high quality mics that are spaced apart roughly the same distance as your ears are from one another. It also utilizes a sound modifier technology which captures immersive sound just like we hear it. Most, if not all mics out there are mono mics – and a normal stereo microphone cannot record the same information in the same manner. The beauty of this system is that you can handhold the Mitra mic or put it on a small tripod and let it roll. Just monitor your levels and you can have this incredibly immersive sound out of the box. You can then mix it into 5.1 if you want as well.

Did Britain’s approach to copyright just grow up? | Bobbie Johnson | Gigaom
Britain's copyright laws are tougher than the US ones, but now it appears they are looking at updating them in several ways, including allowing owners of CD's to rip their discs and a change in Fair Use:

Fair use for parodies: Despite Britain’s rich tradition of satire, copyright laws are so tight that they often prevent parodies and spoofs — for example, recently preventing a broadcast of The Daily Show that lampooned U.K. politicians with footage of parliament and famously leading to the takedown of a parody of Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind. The new laws will allow satirical fair use.

Judge orders shutdown of DVD-streaming service Zediva | Timothy B. Lee
| Ars Technica
Meanwhile, here in the US a judge shuts down a web movie streaming service because "Defendants are violating Plaintiffs’ exclusive right to publicly perform their Copyrighted Works." This ruling probably shouldn't be a surprise given that years ago hotels lost essentially the same suit when they were "streaming" (in the days of analog) to hotel rooms from VHS recorders.See also: TalkingPointsMemo: Judge Shoots Down Internet DVD Rental Service Zediva

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

A couple of months ago a company called Push Pop Press appeared out of nowhere with an electronic book called "Our Choice." I was intrigued by it not because of the book, but because there were hints that they were developing a publishing tool that they might make available to others.

During an online chat at TED.com Mike Matas, User Interface Designer at Push Pop Press gave the following answers[4] about whether they were going to make a publishing tool:

A. The tools we are building are not a development environment but are a layout tool (and much more user-friendly), but we can’t announce any specific details on the product quite yet.

A. We are building a publishing platform that we plan on releasing to the public in the future. Right now it's in private beta and we are working with authors to create books with our tool.

Clearly I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up.

Facebook just bought the company, but not to get into publishing electronic books as the following from Push Pop's announcement reveals:

Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.[1]

It goes on to say:

There are no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta.

I wonder if Facebook made them an offer they couldn't refuse, or whether the company decided that being bought by Facebook was a more secure financial future than being in the publishing game.

If you're in to storyboarding on your phone, well now you can do it on your iPad too. Cinemek has released Cinemek Storyboard Composer HD, an updated version of their existing iPhone storyboard program: Storyboard Composer [which sells for $19.99]. This week it's on sale for $4.99!!

In this webinar learn how to set up the Final Cut Pro X interface for efficient color correcting. It will also cover how to use video scopes, how to color match a series of clips, and the best way to stay within video safe levels

Agenda includes:

Color balancing during media ingestion.

Setting up the user interface for color correction.

Exploring the video scopes.

Color correction filters; Which are new. Which to use. Which to lose.

Presenter: Ben Brownlee is a VFX artist, digital media specialist and instructor with 11 years of production experience across a number of disciplines.

Dashwood Cinema Solutions has announced the version 3.0 update to Stereo3D Toolbox LE — the light edition counterpart to Dashwood's professional Stereo3D Toolbox plug-in for stereoscopic 3D mastering.

Stereo3D Toolbox LE is built on Noise Industries' FxFactory platform and designed to work with Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion and Apple Final Cut Express applications. The v3.0 update qualifies additional platforms, including the new Final Cut Pro X release..

"Stereo3D Toolbox Light Edition is perfect for any 3D enthusiast just stepping into 3D waters. It's very easy to use, and budget-friendly. The version 3.0 release also includes a variety of new features and is already qualified for Final Cut Pro X," says Tim Dashwood.

Features include: convergence adjustment and vertical, zoom and rotational disparity correction tools, "autoscale," a preview screen within the user interface, and the ability to output clips to popular stereoscopic monitors and delivery formats - including YouTube 3D.

New features in Stereo3D Toolbox LE v3.0:

Stereoscope output mode compatible with Hasbro's my3D format

Instantly work with GoPro 3D and Panasonic AG-3DA1 H.264 files in Final Cut Pro X without transcoding or muxing (see video tutorial for details)

We're excited to provide Partners and creators with a new resource that compiles important tips, best practices, and strategies that helps creators build audiences on YouTube. We hope you find the information helpful to your creative process and that we can help you take your channel to the next level.

...it will be the 17th consecutive annual increase in a business whose prices have outpaced the effect of general inflation by more than half since 1999. Theater attendance has fallen by about 10 percent in that period, or even more when measured as a share of the growing population.

Fostex to Launch AR-4i | Fostex
Announced back in April, but this should be available shortly, the AR-4i is an audio interface for the iPhone4 dock connector. The high quality stereo microphone inputs with AD converter improve the audio quality of iPhone4's video recording, video streaming via Ustream, LiveStream etc. as well as recording of live performance and ENG.

This is a contest open to any photographer/videographer around the world who wants to share how creative they are behind a camera. You must be willing to share your creative side and explain exactly how you tackled your project. In order for your BTS video to be well received by our audience, you must include the photo/video gear you are using, show the final images within the video, and also give out useful information to help teach and inspire other photographers.

A so-called "dot upgrade" of a major software product like Adobe After Effects may imply that it’s not significant enough for you to jump on board until the next full version is released. If you think that, you are dreadfully wrong. After Effects CS5.5 boasts enough major new features and productivity enhancements to rival any full version software release.

SonyAlphaRumors has information about a big upcoming announcement from Sony with new lenses (16-50mm A-mount, 55-210 E-mount, Zeiss 24mm f/1.8) cameras (A77 and the NEX-7) and camcorder; NEX-VG20.

The NEX-7 has been rumored since the arrival of the NEX-5 and 3, and was always supposed to be a more sophisticated version of the small mirror-less camera design.

Whats more interesting to me is the impending announcement of the NEX-VG20. How will this differ from the existing model? Will it just be a chip upgrade? My guess is that it will also add 24p support, since nearly all of Sony's high-end consumer camcorders now support 24p. The other complaints about the NEX-VG10 were the menu control system, but I doubt that will change significantly. We shall see...

Monday, August 01, 2011

This past weekend I saw "Cowboys & Aliens" (it was okay, not terrible, not great) but Canon has sent out a press release about the other comic-book based action movie in the theaters right now, announcing that many of the action shots for "Captain America: The First Avenger" were shot on the Canon 5D Mark II.

The DSLRs were used for several POV shots including a car chase and crash, and a high-speed motorcycle pursuit.

“The challenge with a lot of action photography is getting the camera in the right position,” Jonathan Taylor, second unit director/director of photography noted. “I’m always looking to get the camera into impossible to reach places because those kinds of shots make action sequences much more exciting. Most 35mm motion-picture cameras and even the leading digital cinematography cameras are just too big to get into interesting positions.”

Last week I posted a short article about how I was debating shooting an upcoming project in 24p. As luck would have it, I had pretty much made up my mind I was going to try shooting in 24p when I went to the Rule Boston Camera Pub Night last week and Tim Mangini, Director of Broadcast at FRONTLINE, gave a presentation called "CRASH & BURN: Making docs on a tight turnaround," which was all about logistics and dealing with content for documentary film making.

One of the things he mentioned was that they deal with a lot of different acquisition formats, though their final output is 1080 60i.

But that wasn't what caught my attention.

Afterwards he was talking about working with a producer from England who had shot some material in 24p, and who had then had a lot of problems converting the material to 25p (for showing in Europe.) It was suggested that you're better off shooting in 30p and converting to 25p (or 24) than shooting in 24 and going to 25 (unless you conform rather than convert, and have the content play back at 25 frames per second instead of 24.)

And at the same meeting a friend said that he didn't like shooting in 24p because you couldn't do as much to convert it to slow motion as you could with 30p (or 60p!)

The 25/24 issue is a concern, as I do know I want to create a PAL DVD of the content (which would be 50i), and that's a certainty, whereas the 24p is more an aesthetic question.

Clearly I'm going to have to do some experiments to see what the results are when converting 24p to 50i and 30p to 50i.

The warp stabilizer is not a replacement for proper camerawork. You will still need to acquire good looking footage using tools like a tripod or dolly/slider. But this plugin is very good and will open doors to creative technique never before possible without tons of post time and processing power.

...features that aren’t available to free users, including customizable “portfolio” websites and players, review pages that can be shared before a video goes public, advanced reporting and analytics, social media sharing tools and advanced privacy settings.

The $199 a year gives you 50GB of storage and 250,000 plays, though additional storage and plays may be purchased. This could be interesting for corporate users, though sounds like it's not for distributing your movie.

What You See Is What You Get | Manohla Dargis | New York Times
Interesting article about complexity in film, and whether difficult movies just make us think too hard.

Moviegoers fed a strict Hollywood diet may find themselves squirming through, say, a film by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr less because of the subtitles than because of the long takes during which little is explained. The same may hold true for those who watch “The Tree of Life” and want Terrence Malick to connect the dots overtly among his characters, the dinosaurs and the trippy space images.

Cinemorph Filter & Animorphic Lenses Explained | Peter Bohush | Vimeo
A brief explanation of how anamorphic lenses work, and a review of the CineMorph Filter, a lens filter that emulates some of the qualities of a true anamorphic lens.

As a rule, we generally tend to stay away from profiling short films and “one off’ styled clips as far as web series content is concerned. We’d rather review an ongoing web series as it gives us an opportunity to track its development from a production value standpoint. Since the web series is still a relatively new medium, it’s exciting to see how much the content can mature from a production standpoint, and who’s showing signs of thinking outside the proverbial box and willing to push the parameters to a new and never before seen level visually, storyline, and performance wise.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Today is the 50th anniversary of the IBM Selectric typewriter and to celebrate, this week the Post Office announced a stamp. The fact that this announcement happened the same week the Post Office announced plans to close over 3,000 offices might remind us that the Selectric itself stopped production in 1986. One archaic technology celebrating another.

In a post at the Smarter Planet blog, Gordon Bruce retells the history of the Selectric, and how it grew out of a design with a cylindrical type element:

There was a guy by the name of Bud Beattie who was a development engineer and it was his job to get this thing to work. He went home and his wife was complaining about a light bulb that had blown. He screwed the light bulb and like in the cartoon, the light went on. He quickly got a grease pencil, drew circles, and divided it up. This is it!” Changing the typing element from a cylinder to a ball was the solution.

Interestingly, while the Selectric was both the peak, and practically the end of the typewriter, it also played a small part in the early days of computers:

Selectric was the basis for the keyboard input on the revolutionary IBM System/360. A modified version of the Selectric, dubbed the IBM 2741 Terminal, was adapted to plug into the System/360, and enabled a wider range of engineers and researchers to begin talking to and interacting with their computers.

I typed out my first newsletter using a Selectric typewriter, back before the days of PageMaker and desktop publishing. One of the things that really attracted me to the Selectric as opposed to other typewriters was that the type ball could be switched to change the font. Later models even let you change type pitch, switching between 10 and 12 characters per inch.

The keys of the Selectric also had a very solid feel to them, something I often missed when I first started using the light and plasticy keyboards on computers.

The news comes as returns from 3-D screens in the U.S. and Canada for many movies this summer have been unimpressive, including “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 2,” “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Green Lantern.” Overseas, however, people remain more interested in paying extra to see images pop out of the screen.

According to my personal experience, the most reliable and easily achievable materials for good quality armatures are wood and wire. If the budget allows you to hire a professional to create the armatures with top-quality materials then great, go for it. But for us reckless animators that take joy in building the puppets ourselves, some other more attainable materials can still work pretty well.

This footage acts as a timely reminder for all aspiring filmmakers. DSLR image quality – even the line skipping flawed image you get from the Canon DSLR back in 2009 – is good enough for serious work at the highest level.

While I generally agree with the thrust of the post - that it's more important to get out and shoot, than what you're shooting with - a better camera is still a better camera, whether it's better because it's easier to use, smaller and lighter, or produces a slightly better image.

The big question is: How much pain will the transition inflict on Hollywood? Studios already are enduring wrenching change as DVD sales dwindle faster than digital revenue rises. A year ago, Sony eliminated about 450 positions, mostly in home entertainment, while in recent months Disney dropped close to 200 jobs, Warner Bros. cut 50, Fox trimmed 22, and Lionsgate laid off 10.

'Californication' leaves no trail of tape | Peter Catanicas | Variety
The show is now shooting digitally using the ARRI Alexa, producing dailies on set, but still sends the dailies out for color correction:

"When we started the show, we tried to color on-set before handing it off to Tom," said Weaver. "But after a season, Tom said, 'Honestly, what I'm doing here is undoing what you guys did.' You couldn't isolate the colors on-set. If you wanted to warm up a scene you had to put a stain over the entire frame. So this year I'm not doing any on-set colorizing at all. I'm handing the raw material over to Tom. He knows my eye.".

Advice From A Genius: Should You Buy AppleCare? | Jordan Golson | MacRumors
Well should you? This article, based on a post from Thomas Brand who worked as a Genius at an Apple Retail Store, offers advice on AppleCare for different Mac models.